In various computing environments, “links” are used to provide shortcuts to a designated location, whether that location be a stored file, network or Internet address, e-mail address, or the like. For example, in the Internet context, Internet “favorites” or other bookmarks provide shortcuts to corresponding Internet sites. The name assigned to the bookmark is generally the only indication of the contents of the bookmarked page. Thus, descriptive naming is essential for productive use of these and other links.
In other computing environments, proper naming is equally important. For example, search engines provide results to queries entered by a user. The naming of the results of such queries is important to allow the user to select the most appropriate search result(s) for the query. This is particularly important where the user interface is associated with mobile devices, where display areas are more limited than their desktop counterparts.
Another representative computing environment where proper naming is important is in the context of recommendations. A recommendation engine can gather information for a particular user or group of users, such as gathering information related to the most likely selection category for that user(s). Based on the information gathered, the recommendation engine can “recommend” sites or content to which there is a higher likelihood of interest to the user. These recommended sites are identified by links, which must include logical and useful names in order for the recommendation to be of use to the user. Such recommendation engines may be used with mobile devices, which as described above, have limited space in which the recommended link name(s) may be displayed.
Currently, such links are generally named by the title of the page that corresponds to the link. Therefore, if the page accessed by the link has a descriptive page title, acceptable naming of bookmarks may be realized. However, the title may be uninformative and in many cases nonexistent. More particularly, one problem with page titles used as bookmark names is that no page title is defined for the page. In such a case, the page title cannot be used at all. Another problem is that the page title may simply be too generic for practical use, and does not adequately specify the content at the link location. For example, a page title may be used as a title on every page of a multi-page web document, and bookmarks to multiple pages would have the same bookmark name. Another problem with page titles as bookmark or other link names is that the title may be ambiguous across different services. For example, a city name may be the page title for weather forecasts, city guides, cinema guides, etc. for that particular city. Therefore, use of the page title may not always be a good means for naming bookmarks, recommendations, search results, or other links.
In other cases, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or other Uniform Resource Identifier may be used as the bookmark name. However, URLs are often not representative of the associated content. In some cases, the URLs may be exceptionally long, cryptic, or simply non-descriptive and of little to no use as a naming mechanism.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for providing descriptive names for such links. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and offers other advantages over the prior art.